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Rewards for authors who follow up their instructables Answered

Nearly every instructable I find interesting has dozens of questions at the bottom unanswered. Some of them are inane silly questions like "how much does this cost?" but others are quite often asking for help in finishing the instructable.

It's difficult to enforce follow up on posts, but you could offer rewards in some way, even if it were a simple thumbs up/vote count system or something similar.

Discussions

I'm sure the site would love it if authors did this, but yes, it's tough to enforce - there is not much motivation for authors to continue to maintain a project. I'm not really sure why I do it, to be honest! I've previously suggested that the site sends authors emails on the anniversary of the publication of an instructable, saying how many views/favorites/comments have happened in the last year. This would perhaps act as a gentle reminder that their project has a life beyond the initial burst of action following publication, as well as perhaps encouragement to check out and address the comments.

More proactively, well-maintained instructables could be rewarded with re-featuring. This has in fact happened to some of my more popular projects, but that might be more because they're good generators of views rather than the fact I still answer comments on them; hard to know.

Reasons for not supporting their own work are many and various, but will probably include a change of email address or the author choosing not to be alerted about activity on their work.

I do my best to respond to every single comment, and I am helped in this because I have set my alerts to ping me a summary once per day. Maybe this could be the default?

The subject of "liking" comments has been raised several times over the years, and the general consensus has always been "this is not Facebook or YouTube", but maybe it's time to resurrect the Patch option, where you could send a digital thank you to an author, along with a pretty little picture to display on their profile?